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In this, the third installment of the Songs trilogy, Matt Elliott continues to celebrate the values and world-views of working class peoples. If Drinking Songs was dedicated to the worlds favorite pastime, and Failing Songs was about the impossibility of hope when faced with the magnitude of the worlds ills, then Howling Songs is the cathartic venting of bottled up pain. Here Matt Elliott is found screaming into an unrelenting wind, and sounding better than ever before.
Over the course of the trilogy a steady improvement in the overall quality of the songs can be discerned. Elliott’s acerbic lyrics and his droll black humor are still evident but the bleakness of the subject matter (the death of loved ones, sinking ships, stockbrokers) is tempered by a musicality even more touching than what was found on Drinking Songs or Failing Songs. Howling Songs is the masterful culmination of the efforts he began with those discs.
The album begins with the elegiac flamenco of “The Kubler-Ross Model.” Elliott sings in his characteristic slurred, downtrodden style. His multi-tracked vocals hover gently over trembling mandolins. The song is an exploration of grief, and a gentle one, until a little more than halfway through, it explodes into a rage of distortion. Anger, depression, and denial, all stages in the grieving process modeled by Elisabelth Kubler-Ross, are ably expressed. The screeching guitars and wall of feedback gradually give way to slow plucking and soft cooing. The sadness remains, but the process of acceptance has begun. He continues on an otherworldly theme with the spectral “Something About Ghosts,” a story of dead man forced to watch his still living lover have sex with someone else.
Elliott doesn’t allow his anger to be buried, a trait I find refreshing. His sulfurous vitriol finds a ready target in the bankers and bureaucrats who have orchestrated the resource wars that have plagued this decade. On the song “How Much in Blood?” he asks, “how much in gold? / what volume of tears will suffice? / what is the index price of life? / and did it fall or rise today?” It is a question to which no satisfactory answer is given. Gleefully, however, he is able to assert “prices will fall / the markets will stall / …we’ll laugh at your name / and dance on your grave.” Gently he serenades the objects of his hate, mocking them in the process.
The album reaches its musical apogee with “I Name This Ship The Tragedy. Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her.” Elliott sings easily here, with clear enunciations, the words falling cleanly from his lips. The guitars, slow whining of bowed strings, and rippling pianos swirl around each other in perfect harmony. Short bursts from some type of brass horn punctuate the tune, giving it added character. These types of little details that often make a song stand out are lovingly applied throughout the album, as with the gravelly time stretched voices at the end of “A Broken Flamenco” and the low-pitched woodwinds appearing on the albums closer, “Bomb the Stock Exchange.”
With Howling Songs Matt Elliott has clearly set a new standard for himself. The intricate arrangements, crisp production, and piercing lyrics make for a jewel of a record.
samples:
- The Kubler-Ross Model
- I Name This Ship The Tragedy. Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her
- Bomb The Stock Exchange
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Brain Foote, along with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and a few new faces, have produced one of the most varied and unique records I've heard all year. The progress won on their Infinity Padlock EP has been further refined into a near seamless blend of miscellaneous musical styles and sleek, spaced-out atmospheres. With As Good As Gone Nudge has entered a world all their own; nobody else sounds quite like they do.
Initially, it isn't clear what Foote and company are up to on their latest record. The opening song, "Harmo," is a wheezing stretch of noise that never quite gels or finds a groove. It is held together in only the most abstract way: there are no strong rhythms, identifiable lyrics, or particularly notable sonic events, nor is there a particularly strong melody to which one might latch. Honey Owens' voice merely slides in and out of intelligibility behind an orchestra of harmonica, vocal harmonies, guitar, bubbling bass, and other various electronic refuse. It develops a tangible tension, but release never comes. After listening to the album once, however, "Harmo's" place is clear: it is the sound of Nudge warming up and preparing to blow minds. Over the next 35 minutes and six songs the band fuses together dub, rocksteady, drum 'n' bass, psychedelic rock, jazz, and various forms of electronic pop and dance music. The result is a dark, almost brooding album packed full of strong songs, memorable melodies, and an enormous (somewhat sexy) low end. Through it all Nudge sound cool and relaxed, as if these peculiar blends all came to them quite naturally. I imagine the opposite is true, however. As Good As Gone shows some improvisational color, but the album's deliberate pace and sober tenor suggest that Nudge worked very hard to make this recipe sound as good as it does.
After "Harmo" shakes and buzzes away, "Two Hands" begins with a sudden rubbery bass line and a ruffled rhythm section that lends the song an uneven or unsure quality, at least at first. Strands of guitar hum to life and, shortly, Honey Owens sings a lilting tune that matches the music's lazy gait perfectly. It also generates some forward motion. Once she begins singing the song takes off in a multitude of ways. Paul Dickow's unmistakable rhythmic signature pops up almost simultaneously and is matched by both Owen's screeching guitar work and a never-ending cascade of effects, synthesizers, and instrumental variations. To top it all off, Foote inserts some muted, highly processed trumpet into the mix, tacking a distinctly jazzy tone onto the end of an already complex and luxuriant song. That hint of jazz haunts the rest of the record, sometimes showing up obviously and sometimes only vaguely. This is partly due to Nudge emphasizing continuity and development over repetition and partly due to the album's ambiguous use of otherwise familiar styles.
Aside from the repeating bass lines that anchor nearly every track on the album, loops seem to have disappeared from the band's vocabulary altogether. The drums, guitars, and synthesizers featured throughout the record grow and shrink in unexpected ways instead of simply repeating. Nevertheless, strong grooves play a big role throughout As Good As Gone, whether they are subtle or distinctly felt. On "Tito," rocksteady rhythms and unusual synthetic worms of melody produce a weightless or directionless effect, distorting time instead of keeping it. This makes the whole thing sound like a happy and drunken stroll outside a dance hall. As it turns out, the upbeat keyboard skanking, along with the pitch bending and shuffled effects, marks the brightest and happiest point on As Good As Gone. Nudge's staggered beats and confused melodies are at their most playful here. Once it ends everything goes very, very dark, like the album's artwork.
The howling dog on the cover reminds me of the slow and mournful atmosphere found on "Burns Blue" and "Dawn Comes Light." The former is a churning song with a somber bass melody and slithering vocal effects. The airy keyboards and rumbling, cymbal-heavy rhythm generate an isolated mood and further develop the jazz themes only hinted at in the previous songs. The latter is a dreamy, somewhat barren piece populated by bouts of silence and splashes of guitar strumming. It brings to mind the closing song on Infinity Padlock, but this time around the band's dynamic shift isn't nearly as surprising. The quiet guitars and near-whispered vocals eventually give way to a wave of distortion and surging, pseudo-melodious strings, which contrast the previous five songs in a relieving and natural fashion.
The ideas first tested on Infinity Padlock have matured fully by the end of this album. Nudge no longer sound as though they are forcing developments or seeking their voice. Everything has its place, even if that place is chaotic and disheveled. On As Good As Gone, the band sounds completely in control with each member performing at the height of their abilities.
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Friendly Pants finds Sakata, now 65 years young, as agile and observant as ever. Joined by the equally virtuosic duo of Darin Gray on double bass and Chris Corsano on drums—here known by the collective name of Chikamorachi—Sakata's heartfelt blasts of alto saxophone find a rhythm section more than competent to bring seduction to post-bop jazz.
In a classic episode of Seinfeld, the battle of the sexes reaches a tipping point when Jerry lets it be known to an associate of Elaine's boyfriend that he believes her relationship with the saxophonist to be "hot and heavy," which in turns leads to the jazz virtuoso to unveil a new song titled "Hot and Heavy" and doing the unspeakable act he has once refused to do. Yet even a sitcom can display the powerful emotions of jazz, especially with the emotive tenors of the saxophone. Whether Akira Sakata is involved in a hot and heavy relationship is only known to those closest to him but there is no denying that those pangs are ever-present on Friendly Pants, Sakata's first U.S. release in 20 years.
Any listener with a modicum of jazz knowledge will instantly recognize the influences that flow through Sakata's spit valve. Friendly Pants is a journey through late '60s and early '70s bop with a zeal rarely found in modern jazz, which tends to focus on experimentation, electronics, and jamming. The key to Sakata's frantic but organized eruptions are Gray and Corsano, who keep the urges to explode with Sakata in check. There are moments when the ecstasy is too great to combat, such as the energetic "In Case, Let's Go to Galaxy," but the orgy of fractured saxophone, machine gun snare rolls, and cymbal splashes are countered by Gray's poise.
For the few moments of unrestrained bombasity, there are far more focused movements to discover. "That Day of Rain" is a bebop delight, keeping the pace quick but the melody mellow. It's James Dean or Steve McQueen—always unflappable while the shitstorm rains down around them. "Un" is 12 minutes of cigarette smoke and cheap bourbon in a 1950s Greenwich. Sakata pays tribute to Kind of Blue with drawn out notes and a slow roll. The trio work as one, capturing the elegant strokes of jazz's heyday without completely abandoning new world charm.
It's a tender balancing act; one Sakata, Corsano, and Gray have mastered well through numerous collaborations and releases, but it all comes to glorious fruition within Friendly Pants. The idea that is has taken 20 years for Sakata's music to reach American shores once more is a sad thought but we can be glad that Friendly Pants will serve as a constant reminder that the best the jazz world has to offer will always find its way back home.
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This is the first release from these long time friends and collaborators. Having been cohorts for 40 forty years, playing in groups together as far back as 1974, this album captures a day's recording back in 1992. My preconceptions of this collection of vintage home recordings being like the musique concrète stylings of early Dead Voice On Air were shattered within seconds of the album's opening track. I will confess to stopping the LP and taking out the disc to check it was the right album.
"Watch" opens the album with dirge feedback-guitar, heavy crunching drums sounding like a lost, Psychocandy-era, Jesus And Mary Chain single. As the distorted guitars and buried vocals gather momentum, however, they suddenly stop a minute in, and unabashedly the track changes to a warped electronic soundscape. From here "Watch" quickly turns again, this time to a heavy No Wave sound of rapid drums and Sanderson’s free-jazz saxophone. The track ends by serging into a sparse drone with looped Vocal snippets, similar to Spybey’s later, more minimal output.
The five tracks on the album are almost meaningless guides, as the album stops and starts and changes pace and style so frequently it should either be indexed 20-30 times or released as a single 45-minute entity. There’s frenzied garage rock, bass heavy drones, cut-up samples, screeching jazz, and each movement provides no idea where the record will go next. It is strength of the album, however, as it is accomplished with great results making the listening experience akin to the mania of playing The Faust Tapes.
In interviews Spybey has frequently cited Can and Faust as inspirations but never has their influence been more explicit on a release than The Setland L.P. The heavy, repetitive drumming is dotted throughout the album; while the second track, "Power Cut," eventually veers into a heady, feedback dripping, cover of Faust’s "Sunshine Girl." No Wave and Free Jazz nods are found throughout and there are several lengthy menacing ambient pieces backed with radio samples, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s "Ecoli."
The whole album has this warm feeling of being two friends’ condensed mixtape of a lengthy day’s jamming, experiments, and homages to the music they grew up listening to on cold, grey days in the North of England. The Steland L.P. is very raw, obviously recorded with minimal production in a home studio, but what is here transcends their recording limitations. At points the album can be frustrating, as a more catchy moment suddenly cuts out far too soon, but the vast amount of diverse and interesting sounds means there’s never a dull movement, and makes this an exciting and highly recommended listen.
The album is (unfortunately) only available as a digital download from Lens records, as either .mp3 or lossless .flac. Personally I would have liked a physical release, but ultimately it’s great this is available in any format. Let’s hope the follow up album Spybey has alluded to also sees the light of day.
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This second collaboration between these two veterans of the 1980s UK noise/cassette underground is enigmatically rooted in the works of Lewis Carroll and schizophrenic outsider artist August Natterer. The result is an engaging, yet temporally dislocated, foray into ambient industrial music that sometimes favorably recalls some of Cabaret Voltaire's more abstract and loop-based moments (as well as a host of darker, and more sociopathic, tape-based experimentalists).
Zilverhill consists of Australia’s Schuster and Sheffield’s Present Day Buna, a rather inscrutable pair. I could not unearth much information about them except that Schuster was involved in the early stages of the infamously heavy and frightening Dieter Müh. The conceptual foundations of this album are equally mysterious and murky: while I can certainly see how its abstract and often nightmarish atmosphere and strange echoing field recordings and voices could be inspired by a schizophrenic artist, the album also features an inexplicable fixation with Richard Nixon recordings (“Nixon’s portentous voice & actions are intuitively fractured, reappraised, and manipulated to form the spine of the pieces”). It is hard to reconcile how it all coherently ties together thematically, but thankfully the philosophic underpinnings are largely irrelevant to the appreciation of the music.
The sonic content of Latent-Active-Descent is a surreal collage of shifting drones, hypnotically repetitive rhythms, blurred electronics, and disembodied voices. Sometimes it is relatively gentle, such as the sleepy marimba of “Sixteen Provinces,” but (more often than not) it can get quite harsh (as in “The Eternal Day Is Done,” which is reminiscent of some of Severed Heads' early tape loop experiments). However, the songs invariably writhe and seethe with all kinds of panning and surging sampled mindfuckery regardless of the basic material that each piece is built upon. The only time the duo fall flat is with the recurrent howls of agony throughout “Unceasing,” which is heavy-handed to an almost Lætherstrip-ian degree.
While its slow-burning and fever dreamlike nature requires a few listens to fully appreciate, Latent-Active-Descent is definitely an inspired and enjoyable effort. Though the material is very firmly rooted in the ‘80s industrial/noise underground aesthetic, it does not sound dated or regressive at all. Rather, it sounds like a great lost recording from that era (but with the clarity and density of more modern recording technology). This is some eerie, unusual, and otherworldly work.
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On this first release in nearly 2 years, Finnish artist Sasu Ripatti allows a greater amount of his former life as a jazz drummer to enter the fray, offsetting the digital ambience and chaos of his work with a greater sense of the organic, bringing with him Lucio Capece on reeds and Craig Armstrong on piano. The result isn’t quite the jazz trio sound the lineup would suggest but certainly a more natural sound than other releases in the Delay discography.
The disc opens with the slow elongated reverberations of “Melankolia,” which layers distant thumping rhythms and erratic scatter-shot digital beats with spacious electronic textures. The string pluck sounds and jazzy club piano music sit above the dissonant electronic stuff in a stark contrast. “Kuula (Kiitos)” buries the organic sounds amongst a significant amount of processing, collage type sounds are intertwined with isolated, sporadic rhythms and the occasional bit of overt, sparse ambience.
“Mustelmia” and “Toive” both stand out as being more percussion focused pieces. The former is based on rhythms that sound as if they were played deep under water along with some faux didgeridoo textures. The entire piece feels like a pseudo-ethnic track, even with the wet pitch-bent drums and spaced out passages. “Toive” has more of a marching cadence to the drums, recorded far off in the distance. The track as a whole has this feeling of distance, with muffled moaning sounds and instrumentation that seems just out of reach, with only clarinet and echoed keyboards to actually be the sounds in focus.
As the disc begins to draw to its inevitable conclusion, the sounds become even more abstract and experimental. “Tummaa” is a dramatic piece that focuses even more on the abstract textures that characterized the earlier Vadislav Delay releases, dynamically being much more loud and boisterous than the other more subtle tracks. A crystalline synth and arctic ambience balance out the loudness with a sense of delicate isolation. The closing “Tunnelivisio” is the most chaotic moment here, with harsher synth leads and garbled saxophone. The delayed, clattering percussion adds to the dissonance, which for all its chaos still has a warm, inviting quality to it.
The shift towards including more of Ripatti’s jazz background has been a smooth one here, as there doesn’t seem to be any unnecessary force needed to blend the organic with the digital. Tummaa is an album that sounds like no one else, and its dark, yet inviting introverted nature ensures that multiple listenings are required to get the full complex beauty of what is here.
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The duo of Susanna Wallumrød and Morten Qvenild are finally back with a new album but with some disconcerting stylistic changes. While there are still a handful of excellent songs strewn about, the "magical" moments are now locked in a mortal struggle with "early Sarah McLachlan-esque" ones (made infinitely more confusing and improbable by the production involvement of Deathprod's Helge Sten). I fear for where this project is headed.
Susanna has written and performed some stunning music over the years, and the one thing that always made her so special was the unique vulnerability and intensity that she always brought to the material (original and otherwise). Consequently, it is difficult to understand why she takes such a cool and detached stance on 3. I suspect this new aesthetic might result in more mainstream appeal (particularly the first single, “Palpatine’s Dream”), but a lot of the tracks sound like a muted and subtly electronic approximation of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (admittedly an objectively decent album) albeit lacking McLachlan’s warmth or skill at writing memorable hooks.
Notably, this album is made up almost entirely of original songs, as many of Susanna’s past highlights have been covers (Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” springs immediately to mind). That said, the two covers that are included hearken most strongly back to the more disturbing Susanna of old: a sparse, bleak, and unsettling piano performance of Roy Harper’s “Another Day” and a weirdly lurching, dystopian, and robotic take on Rush’s “Subdivisions.” Of course, she has written some memorably torchy/noirish originals in the past as well, but her new songs take a very conspicuous step away from that darkness. There are several songs that flirt with catching fire, such as “Guiding Star,” “Someday,” and “Game,” but unabashedly toothless, poppy choruses invariably sabotage them.
There is very little edge or bite to 3. For the most part, Morten Qvenild does an admirable job with the music (resembling Gary Numan on horse tranquilizers yet in a good way), but it is usually too understated to compensate for the cool shallowness of the vocals (they’ve certainly achieved elegance, but it was a Pyrrhic victory). With the exception of the rather charming electro pop of “Palpatine’s Dream,” the duo’s dabblings in slick pop music are a bit too unrewarding and uneven for me (although I have noticed that this album has inexplicably gotten some rave reviews from the British music press, so perhaps my ears are defective). Hopefully, this is merely a transitional album on the way to something better and not a new direction. I am disappointed, but not yet resigned.
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Christina Carter's music has been compared to Jandek's lately, but that analogy goes only so far in describing what she does. Her style is bare and equally ghostly, but unlike her Texan brother's output, Carter's music on Lace Heart is immediately approachable and tranquil. Each song is a sigh of yearning and contemplation but the hypnotic strumming of her guitar and the power of her voice generate a heavy and sensuous undertow.
Root Strata (2xLP) / Many Breaths (CD-R)
Two years ago a meager 300 copies of this album were made on CDR through Christina's Many Breaths label, each adorned with a handmade cover that included newspaper clippings and original artwork. The patchwork nature of that CDr release has been eschwed by Root Strata in favor of a far more elaborate and stunning package of near equal scarcity (only 500 copies were pressed). New artwork and some flashy vinyl constitute the visual component of Carter's record this time around, both of which compliment the delicate and airy sounds that populate the album's six songs. The auburn bursts of color on the cover translate almost perfectly the blocks of chords that Christina pulls from her guitar. Her style is a blend of jagged rhythmic strumming and diaphanous, almost etheral tones. Melodies often sound as though they are seeping from her guitar in quiet ribbons, but many of the songs feature awkward meters and broken phrases that jump from the strings in an almost improvised fashion. This juxtaposition is probably responsible for many of the Jandek comparisons Carter has been receiving, but her music is far more melodic and sober. For Christina, songwriting is obviously more important than anything else. The atmosphere she develops on the record emerges because of her quasi-ambiguous lyrics and ritualistic performances; the echo and reverb that soak it act only as decorations in an already ornate and severe structure.
The album begins with a simple and looping melody. The repetition is bluesy but the melody is less showy and played straight, at least at first. Christina's chants of "Dream long, dream long" drift out of the speakers as though her voice were resonating from inside a cave. References to sanctuaries and partnerships immediately bestow a sacred quality upon the record and the simplistic, almost droning quality of the "Dream Long" melody appropriately recalls the spellbinding meter of some religious music. As the song slowly unravels, moans of melody bubble up over a dominant rhythmic plucking and send the record off on a solo jam that would be perfectly entrancing were it not for the sudden cut which ends it.
This quick fade or sudden cut is used to conclude a couple of the songs on Lace Heart. It represents the album's greatest flaw and most annoying feature. After listening to seven or more minutes of sinuous guitar parts, the last thing I want to hear is a sudden fade or awkward stop in the music. The majority of the record is a continuous and calming string of understated phrases, however. Both Carter's lyrics and her jumbled strumming elicit a relaxed and hazy sensation not unlike being half awake. On "I Am Seen" she combines a vocal fugue with a rambling guitar line and inverts the relationship typically shared between her and her guitar. Elsewhere, "Long Last Breaths" almost disappears into the midst of its own repetition, becoming very silent before settling into a rumbling, unaccompanied groove.
Lace Heart, like many of Christina's solo records, exists in a meditative, almost obsessive place. In less capable hands a boring or numbing experience might have been the result. Lace Heart's dream-like progression and somewhat obtuse character provide a lot of depth, however, and make it both a superficially enjoyable record and potentially deep listening experience.
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Just 21 years old at the time of this recording, this preternaturally gifted Aussie composer has unleashed a striking and assured debut that draws upon influences from somewhat “difficult” modern classicists such as George Crumb and Alfred Schnittke. Unexpectedly, however, Gardiner largely eschews the complexity and overt experimentation of his precursors in favor of pared-down elegance and melodic simplicity (albeit with some darkly dissonant harmonies).
Self-released
Onliving is a very brief (about 20 minutes) four-song suite, but it sounds vibrant and fully formed as such. There are only five musicians involved (aside from Gardiner himself, credited with the mysterious role of “electronics”) and the foundation is largely built upon a tensely repeating piano pattern that is very much indebted to minimalists such as Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt (not bombastic enough to allude to Glass). The four interlocking movements are all basically variations of the same spartan elements, but they cohere into a masterful tug-of-war between the sparse but insistent piano and the swirling and melancholy clarinet and flute central theme. The best parts of Onliving, however, are the sparingly used yet devastatingly effective strings: they alternate between mournful lyricism and violent churning that show that Gardiner learned a thing or two about passion from another of his major influences- Astor Piazzolla.
There is very little here to find fault with: Onliving is very brief and very simple, but it all works remarkably well. Also, while there is essentially only one true theme repeated again and again, it is quite beautiful and memorable and Gardiner dances around it expertly and teasingly. I suppose the sustain-blurred piano solo that makes up the entirety of the second movement, “The Loving Bells,” is a bit on the boring/filler side, but it is mercifully brief and segues nicely into “Running,” and fits thematically with everything that surrounds it. Also worth mentioning are William’s surprisingly restrained and unobtrusive electronic contributions: until I listened closely and critically, I couldn’t even tell that they were even there. Gradually, however, I came to realize that this album sounds immediate, alive, and remarkably dense given the skeletal ensemble involved, and that credit belongs largely to Gardiner’s behind-the-scenes processing and tweaking of reverbs, delays, and decays.
Naturally, I’d be very eager to hear a deeper, more ambitious, and larger-scale work, but this EP is certainly quite impressive on its own. I read that Gardiner has been listening to a lot of Animal Collective these days, which fleetingly filled me with trepidation about his future work, but Onliving provides ample evidence that William already has a coherent vision and a rare ability to incorporate outside influences seamlessly into it (much like his more established kindred spirit Jóhann Jóhannsson). Classical music needs more new blood like this.
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Artist: Splinterskin
Title: Wayward Souls
Catalogue No: CSR114CD
Barcode: 8 2356647172 1
Format: CD in jewelcase
Genre: Dark Acoustic / Woodland Folk
Shipping: Now
Buy CD | Download Album
Caught in the oblivious borderland, Splinterskin unveils his spell after years of solitude and hermetic isolation, in the form of a harsh, dark folk music. His tales are told using an old classical guitar accompanied by haunting vocals, violin, and soothing whispers cradled in the delicate atmospheres of autumn. With simple yet mystically riddled lyrics that beckon, Splinterskin taunts the listener with hidden meanings, allegorical concepts, nearly indescribable deep feelings, and a sense of universal understanding only a spirit as Splinterskin could possibly weave together as music.
‘Wayward Souls’ is a collection of tales blending life and death, entities & creatures, hidden wisdom, unknown places, pain and suffering, folklore, possession, insanity, nature and the dark world that surrounds.
With tales such as 'Dancing Dead Men,' 'The Thing that Wasn't,' and 'Chanting Bells Call Shadows', one can only suspect the moods are of a dark, moody and nightmarish nature...yet, there are no words to truly describe Splinterskin's message or music.
Tracks: 1. Chanting Bells Call Shadows | 2. Dancing Dead Men | 3. The Crumbling Cabin | 4. Something In The Walls | 5. Moonlight Rain | 6. The Thing That Wasn't | 7. Broken Down Hearse | 8. Still At The Window Sill | 9. Hoofbeats | 10. The Eyes That Hide | 11. The Skarekrow (October Roads) | 12. A Horrible Night To Have A Curse | 13. Black Bird Sorrow Song | 14. The Man On The Porch | 15. A Trail Of Trees | 16. Wayward Souls | 17. Dancing Dead Men (Reprise)
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This sprawling, oft-fascinating limited edition double album of live collaborations features some rather surprising detours from Erik Carlson's previous work. As all of the pieces were composed specifically for performances at Providence's Cormack Planetarium, most of those detours lead towards some appropriately space music and krautrock-influenced places. Carlson, ably assisted by an array of like-minded experimentalists, seems quite at home outside the confines of his usual sound and continues his recent string of impressive albums.
This is the first release in Eric Carlson’s alt-Space series, a planned succession of performances in non-tradition musical venues that are consciously shaped by the location itself. All of the works were composed and improvised (in almost complete darkness) around planetarium displays that Carlson designed with the staff. Aside from the obvious embrace of space-themed sounds (Eric uses samples of radiation, radio emissions, and other thematically appropriate sources), the performances on this album were further inspired by the blurring effects of the planetarium’s domed roof.
The first of the four 30 minute pieces is “The Basin of the Heavens,” a collaboration with Mudboy (Raphael Lyon). It begins with sustained, shimmering guitar and harmonium ambiance. Gradually, some tension and phantom melodic movement is added with passing tones and color is provided by Carlson's fragile web of treated guitars and Lyon's psychedelic organ noodling. As the song snowballs in intensity, it becomes conspicuously more and more like a freaky krautrock jam before the bottom drops out and it morphs into constantly shifting proggy ambience. However, around the 20-minute mark, things get a bit crazy and Eric and Raphael briefly erupt into a flurry of wildly panning radio emissions before easing back into their pulsing, jangling trippiness. Carlson makes quite a few unexpected (yet skilled) transitions on this album, and this piece is no exception, as it ends with a elegantly beautiful and floating coda that favorably calls to mind both Brian Eno’s Apollo and Eric Carlson’s own Charmed Birds album.
“Messier Object 45” is the first of two appearances by Black Forest/Black Sea’s Jeffrey Alexander (the title refers to the Pleiades, incidentally). It commences with a subtle, glimmering guitar loop and a great deal of cosmic and heavily delayed ambience and slowly builds into some throbbing, quietly intense, and rather menacing space rock. Oddly, Carlson and Alexander soon opt to take the music into much less interesting quavering ambient territory for a rather lengthy and momentum-killing stretch. Thankfully, it fades out around the 15-minute mark and the song starts again with a haunting duet between Eric’s melancholy minimalist guitar and some tortured howls and squawks that likely emanate from one of Alexander’s homemade instruments. Ultimately, it coheres into a droning and coruscating outro of layered guitars before fading out for the final time.
Jeffrey appears again on “Cassiopeia” alongside his bandmate, cellist Miriam Goldberg. It begins with a hobbling, yet insistent, plucked cello pattern lurking beneath a seething cloud of surprisingly harsh electronics and bow scrapes. The presence of Goldberg and her cello is quite welcome: she cuts through the heavily-processed and somewhat detached sounds surrounding her both violently and beautifully, resulting in the strongest and most dynamic piece on the album. As with all the previous songs, “Cassiopeia” consists of several movements, the second of which is extremely minimal and consists of a repeating plucked string pulsing beneath a host of creaks, scrapes, and whines. Then, unexpectedly, the trio launches into a mesmerizing and rather devastating reprise of the eerie middle section of “Messier Object 45.”
Carlson is joined by Eyes Like Saucers’ Jeffrey Knoch for the closer, “Lesser Dog, Greater Still,” which notably uses a harmonium yet again for its droning foundation. There are a few moments when the droning becomes too amorphous and edgeless for my liking, but the duo wisely disrupt the tranquility with crackling electronics and short wave radio before it gets boring most of the time. Despite those occasional missteps, the piece becomes quite compelling around the halfway point, as ominous electronic bleeps converge into a pulsing rhythm and Carlson contributes some uncharacteristically frenzied guitarwork (beautifully augmented by some melancholy harmonium by Knoch). However, the crescendo is unexpectedly derailed by the sudden appearance of an off-kilter and wheezing drum machine and the weirdly psychedelic and ethnic-sounding interlude that follows. Gradually, it is enveloped by some gently droning guitar and static-y radio and fades out amidst some forlorn harmonium and scraping strings.
Obviously, a mere CD can’t hope to capture the majesty and impact of such site-specific and visually enhanced performances, but the material collected here is quite memorable and almost uniformly excellent regardless. It is hard to believe that this is only the first of Eric Carlson’s series. The Planetarium Project sets the bar intimidatingly high for the next installment. I wish I lived in Providence.
samples:
- Area C and Mudboy – The Basin of The Heavens
- Area C and Black Forest/Black Sea – Cassiopeia
- Area C and Eyes Like Saucers – Lesser Dog, Greater Still
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